The Underground Art of the Insult

On March 6, 2014, Aretha Franklin paid a visit to the White House for a special event celebrating “women of soul.” Dressed in a brown fur coat, a sequined black dress and a large, glittery pendant, she strode through a dark red door into the East Room, waving regally at a line of well-wishers who stood to applaud her. Among them was another diva, Patti LaBelle, who reached out to grab Franklin’s hand. With a small, swooping motion, Franklin twisted her body away from LaBelle, evading her greeting, and continued walking. She hardly missed a beat.

Video of the apparent dis began to circulate online. Then came animated GIFs that replayed the exact moment on loop, so that it could be relished and examined more closely. The beauty of Franklin’s gesture lay in its ambiguity — was she just focused on getting to the front of the room? Or was she bringing attitude? After scrutinizing the footage, pop-culture bloggers judged it an instance of “legendary” shade, or the art of the sidelong insult.

Shade can take many forms — a hard, deep look that could be either aggressive or searching, a compliment that could be interpreted as the opposite of one. E. Patrick Johnson, who teaches performance studies and African-American studies at Northwestern University, and who has written about the tradition of insults in the gay and black communities, explains: “If someone walks into a room with a hideous dress, but you don’t want to say it’s hideous, you might say, ‘Oooh … look at you!’ ” At its most refined, shade should have an element of plausible deniability, so that the shade-thrower can pretend that he or she didn’t actually mean to behave with incivility, making it all the more delicious.

Throwing shade has become commonplace in our always-on, often-outraged and hyperopinionated digital culture. It can be a form of character analysis or assassination, a way to defend yourself against attacks or initiate rivalries. It’s about dominance and one-upmanship, as was the case recently when multiple entertainment websites, including People.com, reported that Madonna threw “shade” at the rapper Drake. She had taken him by surprise by kissing him onstage and was roundly excoriated for it when a clip showed him looking shocked. She got back at him when she was asked if he was any good: “I kissed a girl, and I liked it,” she replied.

Shade can be performed just as amusingly without words: Earlier this month, the spectacle of the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala, with its attendees mugging and vying for the attention of the cameras, outdoing one another with wild headdresses and avant-garde gowns, could be thought of as a study in nonverbal shade. But shade is not only practiced among celebrities; it’s enacted just as much by people who aren’t famous, especially online, as a way to gossip or blow off steam, often in highly creative, subtle, even stealthy ways.

Shade has always been subversive. It has roots in slave culture, in the development of what Johnson calls the techniques that evolved to allow African-Americans a measure of assertiveness despite being in constant physical and psychological peril. “The threat of being beaten or mutilated was always there if you were to look at a slave master directly in his eye, or if you were to sass, so African-Americans developed these covert ways of communication, which, over time, have morphed into the traditional ways that they interact with one another,” he says. It makes sense, then, that the concept of shade was refined by some of the most marginalized people in American society: gay men, and, later, straight women of color, each of whom had to find socially acceptable ways to communicate humor and aggression. As the writer Tameka Bradley Hobbs explained in an article on the website For Harriet, the practice is “the bitter residue of a people who have mastered the art of dismissing and humiliating others with humor and sarcasm after having been degraded for years ourselves.”

Many people associate shade with Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning,” about drag-ball culture among gay and transgender youth — most of them black and Latino — in New York City in the mid-to-late 1980s. There is shade throughout the film: in the one-on-one interviews with the film’s subjects; in the conversations of secondary characters as they navigate the mean streets of late-80s Manhattan; on the scuffed floors where drag competitions — “a street fight at a ball,” as one character describes them — take place. “Oh, that’s shady!” one participant exclaims after the M.C. questions a competitor’s eligibility in the category of “men’s garments.” (He was wearing a mink coat.) In another scene, the veteran performer Dorian Corey traces the evolution of the personal insult in the drag-ball community from “reading” — identifying and picking apart a rival’s physical or psychological flaws — to its more “developed” iteration known as shade: “Shade is I don’t tell you you’re ugly, but I don’t have to tell you, because you know you’re ugly.”

Madonna’s song and video for “Vogue,” which came out the same year as the film, were lifted directly from competitive ball culture. “Vogueing,” as one drag queen explains in “Paris Is Burning,” is “like taking two knives and cutting each other up, but through a dance form” — in other words, a joyful and even more stylized expression of shade. Madonna’s appropriation of the idea definitively marked the migration of shade from the grimy, cramped ballrooms of 1980s Manhattan into the mainstream. Soon, “shade” became a trend, a word co-opted to signal inside know­ledge of underground urban culture. In 1991, this magazine had a fashion spread titled “Throwing Shade,” which featured Naomi Campbell dressed in bomber jackets and catsuits, a style it called “the new black,” whatever that was.

Shade is currently having another moment, in no small part because of the ascendancy of the African-American vernacular in both popular culture and digital media. Perhaps the most famous avatar of shade right now, aside from the star of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” is the character Cookie Lyon, the star of Fox’s hit show “Empire,” played by Taraji P. Henson. Cookie, the ex-wife of a music mogul, is a fiercely proud, no-nonsense matriarch whose talent for delivering withering looks and devastating one-liners — “The streets ain’t made for everybody, that’s why they made sidewalks” — is unmatched on television. (A Google search for the words “Cookie,” “Empire” and “shade” results in almost half a million hits.) But shade’s most fertile terrain is the quippy, contentious milieu of social media, which prizes bursts of verbal virtuosity. In fact, shade is best served in small amounts: “If you go back to the tradition of the dozens, these were all short rhetorical structures that were designed to thrive in a sentence or two at best,” says the poet Saeed Jones, who is also the literary editor at BuzzFeed.

On the Internet, a complex grammar has developed around shade, retaining much of the pleasure and humor of its older iterations but with wider-reaching effects. Take the subtweet: a tweet objecting to something someone else has said or done without actually using that person’s name. It’s the digital equivalent of talking trash about someone at a dinner table without ever acknowledging the person’s presence. Another shade-throwing tactic is to annotate a social-media outburst with stage directions like “*sips tea*” or “*side-eye*,” as if to say: “I’ll just sit back and demurely drink this beverage while I watch you act a fool and debase yourself.” Shade may be most delightfully expressed through emoji — crying faces (your predictability and pitiful intelligence make me weep), googly eyes (that assertion was so absurd it exploded my brain), emergency-vehicle sirens (alert: We have a live one here). Emoji are so innocently goofy that they make for the ideal shade delivery system, allowing a person to publicly and blisteringly respond to other people’s commentary without, you know, being blistering about it.

Like the drag balls where shade thrived, hip-checking people online can be a competition, and when lots of people are fighting for approval and attention — Facebook likes, Twitter follows, Instagram comments — some of them will start to get sloppy. Jones laments the way in which the “haute-couture rhetoric” of shade has been cheapened “into ready-to-wear,” explaining that shade actually “requires a really critical reading you can’t do casually.” He adds: “I think when most people talk about shade, they’re describing being mean.” True artists of shade have a smoldering quality, an assuredness that flashes in the eyes and ignites in the body. You can trace a direct lineage from New York drag queens, aggressively flaunting their style and sass on the makeshift catwalk, to a provocatively dressed Beyoncé posing on the Met Gala red carpet, clutching her long blond ponytail in a gesture that simultaneously conveys both sexual ecstasy and queenly indifference. It would be a shame if shade, like other African-American art forms that have been taken up by mainstream culture, became diluted, its meaning encompassing any and every insult and attempt at one-upmanship. But maybe that’s inevitable. “It’s absolutely in line with the tradition of American culture realizing that black people have figured something out,” Jones says, with just a hint of, yeah, shade.

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